Alphabet Read Online Free Page A

went through endless preliminaries. Don’t piss me about!
    â€˜Well,’ said Walters eventually, ‘good news. After consideration, as a privilege, but not a right, I’ve decided to allow you access to your last F75 report –’ Why?
    â€˜I don’t want it,’ Simon told him. ‘Why would I? I never asked for it.’
    â€˜These days we are trying to be as transparent as we can,’ Walters continued, regardless, light glinting from the smearless lenses of his glasses. ‘We feel it could be of benefit for you to see these reports, as and when, of course, staffing levels make it feasible. Just put in a request to your Personal Officer.’
    First he had a good laugh. Ask that bastard for something? You must be joking! Then he thought he was indifferent. Then he thought he’d hold out: wrong. He applied and here he is, seated at a metre-square formica table placed plumb in the
centre of a windowless cube of a room, perfectly aligned beneath the rectangular fluorescent panel on the ceiling. Hos-kins is propped against the wall two paces away, sucking his breath in through his teeth, checking his watch every other minute. The report is in its slide binder in front of him. It’s about half an inch thick. He can see that it’s a mistake to have come, but even so, he opens it.
    â€˜Austen has an arrogant attitude. He has made no effort to address any of his offending behaviour other than poor literacy, which can have had only a minor impact on the trajectory of the offence . . .’ Walters himself. Where do they go to learn this stuff ! On it goes, on and on. Five, six pages! He whisks through, almost tearing the typed sheets as he turns them: ‘. . . attended the anger-management course but said it was only to satisfy the institution and commented that he had already discovered most of the techniques for himself . . .’ Well, yes, it’s called put a lid on it, you fucking have to or you’d explode! He looks up at Hoskins, who is looking at the ceiling, cheeks bright with burst veins, dandruff on his shoulders, no doubt fantasising about retirement, likely to be dead within six months of it.
    â€˜Austen is deeply in denial . . .’ These words, typed out by the woman in the acrylic knitwear suits who sits next to the governor-grade offices, clickety clack, makes him want to spit.
Literally, he can feel his mouth fill up. Remove the stimulus! He turns over a few pages at once. Time out, right? The Personal Officer, at least he’s done his with his own hand, pressing hard, making blobs with the biro ink: ‘Good behaviour, but sarcastic and a loner. This man strikes me as a time-bom (sic) that could go off any day.’
    He turns over another clump of pages. Dr Grice!
    â€˜Steady,’ puffs Hoskins, pushing himself away from the wall for a moment in case action is required, then settling back again.
    â€˜Rather than confront his early experiences of abandonment and rejection, Simon has developed a strategy of using hostility
to pre-empt further rejection. He shows no interest in exploring this and over six sessions he frequently used mockery to . . .’
    And so now all at once he’s as tense as he used to get in that apricot-white room of Grice’s: nothing to do but look at the over-painted brickwork, the freckles on the backs of Grice’s hands, the stray grey hairs in his nose, the bald patch, the weave of the cloth his jacket is made from, look and look and look until it’s like some kind of hallucination, waiting for time to pass. Grice could ask a question, and wait twenty minutes for the answer to come, or not. Didn’t seem to bother him. Whenever Simon looked up at his face, he was always looking back, not staring, just alertly looking, just as if something had just been said, and it was setting him off on a new and interesting train of thought. By the time he got out of that room, Simon’s teeth would